Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic and semiotician. He was born in 1915 in Cherbourg, France. After his father died, he was raised by his mother and grandmother. He studied at the Sorbonne in the 1930s and 1940s but struggled with tuberculosis which affected his studies. Throughout his life, Barthes published numerous influential works on semiotics, literary criticism, and photography. He is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Barthes died in 1980 after being struck by a truck in Paris.